Tests find unapproved corn in veggie corn dogs

March 8, 2001

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A variety of biotech corn that prompted nationwide recalls of food products last fall has shown up in yet another product, Kellogg's-made veggie corn dogs, the anti-biotech group Greenpeace said Thursday.

The frozen product, which is sold under the Morningstar Farms label, was purchased in a Baltimore Safeway store last month and tested positive for StarLink corn, the group said. The corn was approved only for animal feed because of unanswered questions about its safety for humans.

The product also contained a variety of genetically engineered soy that is approved for food use, Greenpeace said.

"Americans have asked Kellogg's over and over to stop this genetic experiment on our food, yet Kellogg's refuses to listen and tries to mislead consumers," said Charles Margulis, a Greenpeace spokesman.

Kellogg's spokeswoman Chris Ervin said the company has notified the Food and Drug Administration and was commissioning its own tests of the corn dogs. She said the corn dogs were produced October 4 with corn that would have been grown in 1999. No recall is planned, she said.

She denied an allegation by Greenpeace that Kellogg's has misled consumers into thinking its Morningstar Foods products contain no biotech ingredients. While Kellogg's has tried to make them biotech-free, it doesn't label them as such. The appearance of biotech soy in the corn dogs was the result of a mistake by a Kellogg's supplier, she said.

Food processors have been testing for StarLink since last fall. However, it is virtually impossible to keep some of it from getting into food products because of the way corn is intermingled, said Gene Grabowski, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. "Strict segregation, 100 percent segregation, is impossible with today's food supply," he said.

Greenpeace's announcement came a day after the government disclosed that as many as 400,000 bags of corn seed, or about 1 percent of the country's total supply, have been contaminated with StarLink.

StarLink contains a special protein, called Cry9C, that digests slowly and could be allergy inducing, scientists say.